Two years af­ter tip­toe­ing in­to the pro­tein degra­da­tion space with a dis­cov­ery pact cen­tered on neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, Ab­b­Vie is wad­ing deep­er to ex­plore the more com­mon ap­pli­ca­tions in can­cer and im­muno­log­i­cal dis­eases.

The phar­ma gi­ant is hand­ing Fron­tier Med­i­cines $55 mil­lion up­front to get things start­ed while promis­ing to re­im­burse its pre­clin­i­cal R&D costs. In ad­di­tion to drug can­di­dates that tar­get E3 lig­as­es — a key mem­ber of the body’s nat­ur­al degra­da­tion sys­tem — Fron­tier will al­so be scout­ing small mol­e­cule binders to tar­gets.

At the core of Fron­tier’s plat­form, CEO Chris Var­ma pre­vi­ous­ly ex­plained to End­points News, is some­thing they call chemo­pro­teomics. By ex­am­in­ing tem­po­rary pock­ets in pro­teins, they find new ways to bind tar­gets usu­al­ly con­sid­ered un­drug­gable.

The plat­form has opened up a vast ar­ray of tar­gets, he sug­gest­ed in a state­ment. Team­ing up with Ab­b­Vie will cre­ate a shared pipeline sep­a­rate from its in­ter­nal one, and the big­ger part­ner will be ful­ly re­spon­si­ble for clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment once a pro­gram cross­es the thresh­old.

Fron­tier is based out of South San Fran­cis­co, just min­utes from the R&D hub Ab­b­Vie has blue­print­ed in Oys­ter Point. In ad­di­tion to the up­front, it’s el­i­gi­ble for more than $1 bil­lion in mile­stones, $45 mil­lion of which are lined up for the com­ing year.

Tar­get­ed pro­tein degra­da­tion and chemo­pro­teomics are among the key strate­gic fo­cus ar­eas at Ab­b­Vie, said Jose-Car­los Gutiér­rez-Ramos, VP of dis­cov­ery.

It’s not alone. Sanofi, Roche, Bay­er, Gilead and Ver­tex have all inked their own pro­tein degra­da­tion pacts, high­light­ing a slate of pi­o­neer­ing as well as up-and-com­ing play­ers. While can­cer tar­gets loom large, im­munol­o­gy is al­so emerg­ing as a key field of in­ter­est.

Back in 2018 the com­pa­ny tapped Mis­sion Ther­a­peu­tics to un­earth some deu­biq­ui­ty­lat­ing en­zymes to tack­le Alzheimer’s and Parkin­son’s dis­ease. One year ago it chose a pan­el that’s go­ing in­to fur­ther char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and screen­ing.

More than five years after Corey Fishman and Michael Dunne dusted sulopenem off Pfizer’s shelves — the second castoff antibiotic they’ve brought out of the pharma giant — and founded Iterum Therapeutics around that single drug, they have lined up a quick shot at approval with priority review from the FDA.

The decision, six months from now, will mark a make-or-break moment for a struggling biotech that has just enough cash to keep the lights on until the third quarter.

Immunocore spent much of 2019 dealing with the fallout of the Neil Woodford scandal, as the former star investor’s fall crashed the biotech’s valuation out of unicorn range. Now it turns out that the company spent 2020 dealing with another internal scandal.

The longtime UK biotech darling disclosed in their IPO filing last week that they had fallen victim to an alleged kickback scheme involving one of their employees. After a whistleblower came forward, they said in their F-1, they spent the summer and spring investigating, finding fraud on the part of an employee and two outside vendors.

It’s not new for Lonza, the Swiss CDMO nearing its quasquicentennial anniversary, to be in the upper echelon of the biotech manufacturing industry.

But 2020 — as it was for many CDMOs — was a special year even by Lonza’s standards. The company inked a deal to produce 1 billion worldwide doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and tapped pharma vet Pierre-Alain Ruffieux to lead its operations, moves which have allowed Lonza to make a myriad of other deals that will continue to ramp up its global production capacity.

Longtime Vertex CEO Jeffrey Leiden is taking on a new role.

Leiden has been appointed chairman of Tmunity’s board of directors, the company announced Monday. The move comes about a year and a half after Leiden announced he’d be stepping down from his position at Vertex.

Vertex saw immense growth under Leiden, leading the company from its exit out of hepatitis C, when cures were moving in, and into cystic fibrosis. The company’s cystic fibrosis triple combo therapy Trikafta is already its best-seller, reaching the distinction just six weeks after launch and recording the strongest first quarter of sales for any drug, per some estimates.